Articles by Mark U. Edwards Jr.

In last year’s election campaign we were reminded that images can overpower words. The U.S. military prohibited the taking of pictures of flag-draped coffins arriving from Iraq even as it freely shared statistics on the number of American dead. It knows that the images are more powerful than the numbers.

In Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg's film AI: Artificial Intelligence David is an android, created in the image of a human boy and designed to provide a couple with an emotional substitute for a gravely ill child. Once the phrase that activates him to love is read to him, David has no choice but to love the activater, even if his love is not reciprocated.

Although many of us may be unfamiliar with the name Donald Knuth, not so computer scientists and programmers. According to the Online hacker Jargon file (Jargon File 4.2.3), "Knuth" is "mythically, the reference that answers all questions about data structures or algorithms.